SkyTranSummary
From SkyTran Implications Wiki
Imagine a ski lift running 30 feet above a city street, supported by standard utility poles. Now replace the cable with a 1-foot-wide guideway surrounding a new kind of magnetic levitation (maglev) track called Inductrack (developed at Lawrence Livermore National Labs for missile defense rail guns and energy-storage flywheel bearings). Streamlined 2-passenger cars hanging from the track move at up to 100 MPH driven silently by magnetic coils in the track with the equivalent of 200 MPG energy efficiency.
This track is like a freeway, with on- and off-ramps and cloverleaf intersections; so traffic on the main lines never needs to stop. The electronics for switching at junctions is in the cars; so the ramps are passive (except for accel/decel linear motors and controllers) and very cheap: target is $10,000 apiece. Cars stop at a simple debarkation platform 10 feet in the air and customers walk down steps to the ground while the cars roll forward (Inductrak levitates at 1-2 km/hour, but below that auxiliary wheels support the cars) to a mirror-image embarkation platform. Cars wait for people between the platforms, unlike with mass transit. You just climb the staircase to a waiting car, speak or touch-select a destination, pay with a wand or smart card and head directly to your destination under computer control.
The proposed economics are incredible: a few million dollars a mile for the tracks -- similar to the cost of paving a city street -- $10,000 per stop and a few thousand dollars apiece for the cars. See SkyTranEconomics. I lived in Paris for a year recently; a large fraction of the population has no cars and happily relies on old-fashioned public transport. Replace that with 100 MPH point-to-point travel, and you see why I think 40-60% replacement of automobiles is conservative.
Despite its packing 100 MPH vehicles every 60-70 feet, SkyTranSafety should be dramatically better than automobiles, probably also higher than subways and street railway. How?
- The vehicle is high above the ground; so there won't be collisions with automobiles and trucks, pedestrians, animals, debris on the roadway, etc.
- Derailment is impossible, because the vehicle is captured by the guideway. A long central rib the length of the car runs up through a slot in the bottom of the guideway shell and hooks over the Inductrack; the Halbach magnet arrays are mounted on its bottom side above and on both sides of the Inductrack for support and stability. This is the strongest part of the car assembly (including the magnet arrays it's also most of the weight) -- those cars aren't going anywhere.
- There is no oncoming or cross traffic, because east-west tracks are 20 feet in the air and north-south tracks are 30 feet or vice-versa -- there are no intersections.
- The cars hang below the track instead of riding above it; so they won't hit stationary objects like the ill-fated maintenance truck in the German TransRapid maglev train disaster, or other vehicles and pedestrians on roads today.
The above safety dimensions are passive -- the ideal. Only one must be active: automatic braking. Short-range radar detects if the car ahead has stopped, and the computer triggers 6G mechanical braking against a rib molded into the guideway shell. Because the brakes grab the rib from both sides, they can generate much more force than the .5G deceleration possible with standard tires on dry pavement. Because the braking surface is inside the frame, rain and ice and snow have much less effect. 6G requires passengers to wear more effective seat belts than the typical automobile today, but it is within amusement-park ride ranges, far below the level that would cause injury -- and it decelerates from 100->0 MPH in just 54 feet. Combined with computer instead of human braking reaction times, 70-foot spacing is actually very conservative: the equivalent of being able to stop your car completely if the vehicle ahead of you stopped instantly (e.g. a tractor-trailer jackknifing into a bridge.)
LINKS:
- Official "Unimodal" SkyTran site: http://www.unimodal.com
- Raucous, incredibly detailed original SkyTran site: http://www.skytran.net/
- Lawrence Livermore site for Inductrack maglev SkyTran relies on: http://www.llnl.gov/str/Post.html
Also see: SkyTranBusinessProposition SkyTranEconomics SkyTranSafety
By --HowieGoodell 20:11, 9 August 2009 (UTC)HowieGoodell
